"In a natural way, that's what this landscape does: It catches water."

The Meadowlands were hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, and in the months since the storm residents of low-lying towns along the Hackensack River have been waiting for a regional plan to stop the storm surge that put them underwater.

One bold new plan completely reimagines the Meadowlands in Hurricane Sandy's wake.

The teams are polishing up proposals for public presentations next month in Jersey City and Manhattan. If selected, the projects would secure funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for implementation.

"There are 14 communities in the Meadowlands area. All 14 were hit," said Alexander D'Hooghe, an associate professor at MIT and member of the MIT CAU + ZUS + URBANISTEN team. "And the mission is to find the project that benefits one community, and then the next one, then the next one, and the next one, and find a grand bargain from which everybody from these pilot sites will get better."

THE MEADOWBAND

For centuries, the Meadowlands was seen either as a wasteland in which to dump things or an engineering challenge to be overcome. A 1928 article in Popular Science Monthly, for example, imagined a "Magic City from a Swamp" that would pile 200 million cubic yards of dirt into the meadows, creating a sprawling urban complex to fit a population of 730,000.

These days, the drafters of grand plans are more interested in working alongside nature than conquering it. Kristian Koreman, an architect and designer on the MIT CAU + ZUS + URBANISTEN team, said their plan would look to increase the acreage of wetlands, restoring some of the natural "sponge" that decades have paved over.

The team's plan has two main features: A large, urban wildlife preserve featuring natural wetland to absorb floodwaters, and a long embankment, or berm, keeping those waters from spilling into developed areas. They're calling it the "Meadowband."

Inside the Meadowband would sit a kind of marshy Central Park — "a huge, regional urban wildlife park in the middle of this metro region that people can be really proud of, and swim and fish in," Koreman says. Outside the berms, the team imagines walking and biking trails, mixed commercial and residential development and even a bus rapid transit (BRT) line. (Take a tour of the plan here)

If all this sounds a little, um, bold, it might be by design. The competition challenges its participants with addressing "structural and environmental vulnerabilities that Hurricane Sandy exposed in communities throughout the region and developing fundable solutions to better protect residents from future climate events."

That could take decades here in the Meadowlands, and the team's selection will hinge on whether they can sell local stakeholders on their vision. At community workshops in Lyndhurst and Secaucus in recent weeks, they've heard from residents who don't want to see their own homes rezoned out of existence, local officials worried about the plan's effect on ratables and environmentalists who'd rather see development leave the area entirely.

"To build the dikes and berms, they're going to have to deal with hundreds of property owners, and those property owners probably run the gamut from mom and pops to big development corporations," Bill Sheehan, head of the environmental group Hackensack Riverkeeper, told NJ.com. "If you have one holdout, there's no sense building the rest of it."

Sheehan would rather see a kind of planned retreat away from flood-prone areas, something many have called for in Sandy's wake.

"I'm a strong proponent of Blue Acres — getting people out of harm's way, moving people to upland areas so they won't be subject to flooding whenever the river decides to find its flood plane, which was basically destroyed by all this development in the first place," he said.

A regional reimagining of the Meadowlands district also means getting at least 14 towns to agree on a vision of the future. That's no small task in New Jersey, where home rule rules. The region's tax-sharing program would likely have to be redrawn if significant zoning changes were made, for starters. But the design team points to the example of the Meadowlands Commission, the state zoning and planning authority that has overseen development and environmental restoration in the area, as an example of a regional approach that shows results.

Their workshops have also brought locals together with the team's architects and urban planners, bent over large maps spread on tables, markers in hand, to shape the project to their needs.

"We are not here to present you a project design which you can then say, good or bad," D'Hooghe said at one such meeting in Secaucus. "We're here to work on this together. This is not a plan that's being concocted in a back room where you're presented with a final outcome. This is really a work in progress."

Public presentations are scheduled for April 3, and the jury, headed by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, will pick winners based on their viability. Local towns, meanwhile, have submitted their own, smaller wish lists — from bulkheads to back-up generators and floodgate updgrades — to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"It's going to take a lot of money to fund something like that," Secaucus Mayor Michael Gonelli told NJ.com after a Rebuild by Design workship in his town. "So we're trying to do things that can be done in the immediate, now, to stop these kinds of occurrences from happening. But this is great. The more people that are getting involved, and the more people that are looking at this area, the more ideas that come up, the better chance you have at solving some of these problems."